HN Debate: '2026 Will Be the Year of On-Device Agents'
Hacker News·medium signal
A Hacker News thread argues agents — state machines that plan, execute, update beliefs, and loop — are fundamentally different from chatbots and are moving from demos to infrastructure, with the local-first/local-gateway model pitched as the right architectural bet for privacy and control. Commenters cite self-hosted runtimes like Jan and GPT4All. The discussion crystallizes a shift toward running agentic loops on user hardware rather than hosted APIs.